A little more than six months ago we wrote an editorial
about Intel's future technology after Core 2 Duo, titled "Life After Conroe."
Life after Conroe inches closer, but, in the meantime, more details on the
architecture are available today.

DailyTech had the opportunity to chat with Mark Bohr, Intel Senior Fellow, and
Steve Smith, Intel Vice President DEG Group Operations, about the
upcoming CPU design.

The primary focus of Intel's next-generation process technology is
Penryn. Penryn is the specific codename a 45nm mobile shrink of the Conroe core,
but the codename may also be used to describe the entire product family.
Early last year Intel announced it would optically shrink to the next process
node every two years. Staggered one year later, the company would also
announce a new microarchitecture. This philosophy of shrink followed by
architecture revision will undergo its first real milestone with the node
shrink from 65nm to 45nm Penryn. One year after the 45nm Penryn
shrink, Intel is also expected to announce its next-generation
microarchitecture successor, Nehalem.

Intel claims the upcoming Penryn will fit 410 million transistors for the
dual-core model, and 820 million transistors for the quad-core variants -- dual-core Conroe utilizes just 298 million transistors.
Intel's 45nm SRAM shuttle chip, announced last year, had a little over 1 billion
transistors and fit on a 119mm^2 package. However, the initial Penryn
quad-core processors will use a multi-die packaging, so it's realistic to expect only 410 million transistors per die at launch.

The optical shrink allows the engineers to boost clock speed, but the
additional real estate means the company can put more logic on the processor as
well. "Most of that transistor savings is spent on increasing the cache
over Core 2" added Smith.

Penryn is still not without its mysteries; a primary concern for enthusiasts is
motherboard and socket support. Penryn will launch on Socket 775 -- meaning
existing motherboards can physically harbor the new CPU, but electrically might
not. "Motherboard developers will have to make some minor changes to
support [Penryn]. We can't guarantee that a person could just plug the
chip into every motherboard on the market today." However, Smith
also claimed the Penryn
boot test that grabbed so many headlines last week occurred on unmodified
hardware that included a notebook, several desktop motherboards and several
server motherboards.

The lithography process for Penryn, dubbed P1266, is not just a shrink from
65nm to 45nm. Perhaps the most significant advance on P1266 is the use of
high-k dielectrics and metal gate transistors. In a nutshell, the
polysilicon gate used on transistors today is replaced with a metal layer and
the silicon dioxide dielectric that sits between the substrate and the
transistor is replaced by a high-k dielectric.

Intel's push for high-k dielectrics and metal gate transistors may be more
significant than the node shrink. Intel's guidance documentation claims
with the new high-k dielectric, metal gate transistors offer a 20% increase in
current, which can translate to a 20% increase in performance. When the
new transistor technologies run at the same current and frequencies as Core 2
Duo processors today, translates to a 5-fold reduction in source-drain leakage
and a 10-fold reduction in dielectric leakage.

"The implementation of high-k and metal gate materials marks the biggest
change in transistor technology since the introduction of polysilicongate MOS
transistors in the late 1960s" claims Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder
attributed with coining "Moore's Law."

Intel would not reveal the materials used in its metal gate technology, though
Smith announced that the dielectric is hafnium based. Hafnium dioxide has
been the leading candidate to replace silicon oxide inside academia for
years. A different material is used for PMOS and NMOS gates.

Intel's lithography roadmap no longer ends at P1268, the 32nm node.
Earlier today Intel revealed its 22nm node, dubbed 1270, slated for first
production in 2011.

Smith closed our conversation with "In 2008, we'll have Nehalem."

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

Ahhhh, quite true, quite true. I tend to associate the entire line with the mobile codename. But if you're talking about -just- the mobile processors, then sure, they aren't decreasing TDP. It's a thermal design spec that usually applies most accurately to the top frequency part, typically not lowered for the rest in order to encourage one cooling solution for the entire line. Which is why Penryn isn't lowering the TDP - far more friendly in the laptop space to not have to do a redesign, and especially to be able to use a Merom in a laptop designed for Penryn.

That interoperability isn't quite as important in desktop/server space as is getting the cost of cooling solutions down further. Hence those thermal guidelines are far more in line with the actual characteristics.